Hellsborough Exposed

The quickest way off Onesmoor isn't always the one you take. Blocked once by a field of demonspawn and once by snoughweed — I won't walk through either, whatever the shortcut costs me — the descent toward the Middlewood road can double in length before you've covered half the distance as the crow flies. Every route down that moor answers to something growing in it long before it answers to the map.

Nobody in Hellsborough gets vitamin D deficiency, whatever the murk blocks out overhead, and it took me embarrassingly long to work out why. The psycmask, worn so constantly it barely counts as worn, feeds the body everything sunlight would have — nutrition included — through its nanomaterial weave. Clever species, the nascenti; convenient too, that the thing keeping you healthy is also the thing keeping tabs on you.